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Best and worst calendar years on record

Annual/extremes · 1928 to 2025 · total return · 2 sources · data as of 31 Jul 2026

The stock market gives you one number a year, and once you have almost a century of them, some are extraordinary in both directions. This page is the record of those extremes. The biggest calendar year gains in S&P 500 history, the biggest losses, and what the whole spread looks like when you lay 98 years side by side.

I put it together for two reasons. The first is that most people have no real feel for what a bad year looks like until they're sitting in one, and that's a late moment to be finding out. The second is that the worst year on record isn't the one nearly everyone names. 2008 gets called the worst year in stock market history constantly, including by sources that are careful about everything else, and it isn't. The reason that error travels so well is a small detail about where a data series starts, and once you've seen it you'll catch it everywhere.

There's a section on the average year too, which is worth reading because the average year barely exists. Returns pile up in the twenties and thirties or they go negative, and the middle is thinner than you'd expect. Everything here runs 1928 to 2025 on a total return basis, so dividends are counted in. Two sources sit at the foot of the page with their dates, and if a figure looks wrong to you the originals are one click away.